The Booker Dozen

The 13 longlisted contenders have been selected, and anticipation for the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize now begins. The Booker Prize is the annual British award given to a single work of fiction published in English in the UK and/or Ireland.

Their Substack page claims the 2026 list “rewards risk” and has “something for everyone.” Personally, I’m not sure the latter should be important criteria when searching for significant literary achievement, but then the award has come under fire in the past for selecting fiction that’s perplexing and out-of-reach to the everyday reader. Whatever. My issue with the Booker remains stuck in their 2014 decision to go global and include any book in English that was published in the U.K. Previously, eligibility was limited to fiction from the U.K., Ireland, Zimbabwe, and the Commonwealth of Nations.

The years prior to 2014, I got excited about the Booker longlist for the marvelous discoveries it brought to the forefront, unusual finds such as The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris, published by an obscure (to me) independent press in Scotland in 2013. That novel consistently comes to mind when I think of the former times, and now, pulling it off my bookshelf, I’ll share the book’s cover blurb by the London newspaper Sunday Express: “One of those books you cannot put down … Some of the women could have been created by Jane Austen.”

This year’s longlisted nominees have been culled from 163 books published between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026. Douglas Stuart, Marlon James, and Elizabeth Strout are authors who’ve been nominated and/or won in previous years. Here’s the full list. The three books below, with brief descriptions, are the ones I’m keen to read, although I may wait to see which novels make the short list of six, to be announced September 22. Titles are linked to their descriptions on the Booker website. Images below feature dust jackets of the American editions.

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman takes place as a realtor shows an idyllic country house to a disgraced professor. She describes to him not only the qualities of the house but also of Helen, the former owner whose presence remains palpable. The professor wonders if maybe there’s “a chance to buy his way into a simple life, close to the land, that’s always been out of reach to him.”

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry switches between the stories of a curator who dresses the rooms of a medieval palace and that of the long-ago king who inhabited them. From the novel’s description: “May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present.” 

In the novel Switzy by Emma Cline, protagonist David Hastings is on his way to Zurich in a private plane. Along the way, he stops in London to visit his daughter, and in France to meet with an estranged friend. David’s in his 70s, a retired executive who’s losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. From the novel’s description: “Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he’s relied on, vanish.”